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5-Minute Guide to Text Analytics

Across industries and use cases, unstructured content can reveal an entirely new world, messy but full of potential insights normally not found in structured data. A world that can’t be ignored — either for the sake of maintaining an organization’s competitive health or improving its domain competence. The volume of information that enterprises must cope with has been growing exponentially for decades. Today that information is primarily digital. And most of it — 80 percent by accepted industry estimates —is unstructured.

IDC, which took a five-year break from its well-known digital universe studies, is back with a new study — Data Age 2025: The Evolution of Data to Life-Critical. The study pegs the size of our current digital universe at about 20 ZB, zettabytes. One zettabyte equals one million petabytes. That’s a lot of information. Its projection to 2025 isn’t exactly a hockey stick, but it would make one side of a very steep half pipe for an edition of ESPN’s Extreme Games.

DOWNLOAD: 5-Minute Guide to Text Analytics

Of course, the digital universe extends well beyond the information created and collected by enterprises. Nevertheless, as the overall data pie grows so does their slice of it. And much of what they do create and collect goes un-analyzed, robbing executives of the insight they need to make data-driven decisions. Analytics initiatives that don’t include unstructured content are, quite literally, only half baked. As Forrester’s Boris Evelson points out in his blog Expand Your Big Data Capabilities with Unstructured Text Analytics, “insights derived from unstructured sources lag those based on structured data.”

Did you know that text analytics is used for everything from enriching customer insights to identifying fraud to determining sentiment about products and services? The much-valued “360-degree” view of the business can’t possibly exist without unstructured information. Instead, you’re more likely to have a 180-degree blind spot. By automatically identifying key concepts, extracting entities, and analyzing sentiment – with multi-language support – text analytics adds structure to the unstructured so it can be added to a knowledge graph, along with the structured data.

Download the “5-Minute Guide to Text Analytics” prepared by Attivio to learn how cognitive solutions surface the untapped business value typically hidden in unstructured content.